When we land new clients, it’s not unusual for them to want to rush through PPC implementation. Often, they’ll have a big promotion or event coming up, and they need to get their campaigns live as soon as possible.
We understand this, of course. And we do everything we can to move things along quickly.
But at the same time, some problems are inherent in rushing into PPC too quickly. And these problems can impact not only your immediate results, but also cast a shadow over future results as well.
In this post, I outline the top three problems that can result from rushing into PPC.
1. Neglected Landing Pages
There’s no denying it: Creating landing pages takes time. And unfortunately, lOf course, we’ll give you, your marketing and your tech team as much direction and support as we can. But they still take time.
When clients are in a rush to implement, proper development and set up of landing pages is one of the first things to get sacrificed. As a result, we may end up with one or two “generic” landing pages instead of multiple landing pages tailored to each conversion path.
Unfortunately, these landing page compromises come at a cost. For example, when one of our clients switched from a web page “landing page” to a real landing page, their PPC leads jumped by an astonishing 637 percent!
In addition, we often see client quality scores suffer (sometimes greatly) when customized landing pages aren’t in place. In turn, our clients end up paying more per click and their conversion rates suffer. In time, we sometimes have to pause these campaigns.
So what can you do?
While we recognize that creating 200 landing pages for all 200 of your campaigns might be pushing it (for example), we will say the more custom landing pages you have in place, the better.
Then the strategy is to group together campaigns and/or ad groups as logically as possible and funnel them into the landing pages you have.
In other words, speaking metaphorically, all apple-related ad groups (Gala, Red Delicious, Granny Smith, etc. ) lead to an apple landing page. All orange-related ad groups (Navel, Cara Cara, Tangerine, etc.) lead to an orange landing page.
While it’s not a perfect approach, it’s better than having apples and oranges going to a fruit salad landing page.
2. Forgotten Marketing Integration
PPC doesn’t (or shouldn’t!) operate in a vacuum. After all, it’s only one part of your marketing strategy—even if it’s the most fun part!
So whenever you look at PPC, you should also look at all your other marketing channels, from social media to email marketing to SEO. You want to make sure everything fits together and that every element supports the other elements.
But when you rush to implement PPC, it’s all too easy to forget about integration.
We know how important marketing integration is at Group Twenty Seven, which is why we’ve made it an integral part of our onboarding process. We take the time to get to know you and your businesses. We see what marketing channels you’re using, what promotions you have coming up and what kind of messaging you prefer. And we use a variety of tools to gather this information, including calls and questionnaires.
And while it’s possible to speed up this process to some degree, there are limits. The bigger the rush, the more likely things are to fall through the cracks.
3. Half-Baked Conversion Tracking
When a promotion, product launch or other event is looming, it’s easy to put conversion tracking to the side and promise to get back to it. After all, you’re desperate to get your ads in place in time.
But then your ads go live, you get all kinds of traffic and … then what? How do you interpret that traffic?
Is the traffic relevant? Is it something we should build on and encourage?
Or is the traffic irrelevant? Is it something we should limit and negate?
Unfortunately, without conversion tracking in place, it’s not always easy to tell.
And if we make the wrong decision, we risk either losing out on valuable returns or wasting precious budget.
When conversion tracking is in place, it’s no longer a guessing game. We know exactly what’s happening and what to do about it. And this is why we make conversion tracking (and conversion tracking audits) part of our client onboarding process.
Don’t Wait to Get Started!
These aren’t all the problems that can result from rushing into PPC, but they’re the most common ones.
The more time you can give us to set up and implement your campaigns, the better. So don’t wait until you have something big on the horizon. The time to call us is now!
